Since there’s a man painting the window on the other side of my sewing machine, and if I worked I’d be about a foot from his crotch I’ve decided to write a blog post instead.

The first thing any crafter struggles with is what to make and I’m no different. I can walk into a craft store and spend hours, coming up with a thousand different projects that would be really cool. I’ve done it, and have the materials of hundreds of cool projects lying fallow in my supplies to prove it. (Plus another couple hundred pages of magazines with inspiration or things I want to make on top of that, and let’s not even talk about my Pinterest account.) Starting a crafting business was like that for me. I had a lot of ideas and little direction. Now, when I look at business sites and they talk about formulating a business plan and 5 year goals and whatnot I just have to laugh. I don’t know a single handmade business owner who did it that way. We all just started making stuff, thought “hey, somebody might buy this” and opened shop.

Aren't these blown egg geodes cool?

Which is a good a way to do it as any I guess. Especially when you’re working on this kind of scale. If we were talking about a big corporation, or hell even a small brick and mortar business, that would be different. But when you’re talking about a business whose greatest investment capital is probably already sitting in the craft room then it’s a different story. I didn’t have to go to a bank and take out a loan to get started, I just made stuff with what I already had. Even though it’s not a bad way to do it, I would have done it differently had I gone into this thinking “business” instead of “make a little money, might be fun!”

For one thing, I would have nailed down my product to begin with. That would have saved me a little money on supplies that never got used (in the case of the pet items idea) and a lot of time and effort (in the case of the diaper idea). Arriving at my one true thing wasn’t a long process, but it was long enough. I think that’s one of the beauties of the micro scale handmade business. You can fail without going bankrupt. You can try new things without a great deal of expense. Research and development is natural and fluid. Feedback is pretty instant. Change is a good thing, and doesn’t feel like such a huge risk. Because it isn’t.

Of course there have been changes to my shop even after I settled on Ruggles. I’m constantly trying to improve my items and my customer’s shopping experience. Being online, I have to keep updating my product and my shop to stay viable and current.

Some of the changes I’ve made have been to make my Ruggles bigger. Create a permanent pattern base that I can work from so they are all consistent in size. Went from using Velboa furs to Minky. I switched from using safety eyes to embroidered eyes. Made my tags double sided and filled the back with everything I need to be CPSIA compliant. I’ve changed my picture background (several times), orientation and size. I streamlined my item description and moved a lot of useful but not critical information from there to the policies section. I created a stand alone website. I’ve tried and discarded a dozen different marketing ideas (I’ll save the specifics on that for another post).

I still like this background, but it didn't do anything to showcase my Ruggles.

And that doesn’t even begin to touch all the changes I’ve made in suppliers, supplies, logo design, tags, and on and on. To sum up: change is good. When you’re running something this small $10 spent on new business cards can make it feel like a whole new business. So you can change quickly and respond to customer input, competition and innovation.

It only took me about 7 hours to write this post! I’ll have to talk about the unbalanced balancing act of Mom, wife, housekeeper and business owner. Later.

I can totally relate! Except I didn’t try other products – Mon-stors were my very first sewing project and they took off like wildfire. I didn’t have a business plan or anything, just something people loved that I loved to make. I patented the idea and its a full time thing now. 🙂